Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 287-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Vansina
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Crystal Ball ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
Vast Area

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it.My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
American Thought

American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction provides an introduction to the history of American thought from the sixteenth century up until the present. Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European commentators and explorers. American thought grew from this foundation of expectation and experience, both enriched and challenged over the centuries by developments including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the rise of capitalism, the proliferation of diverse religions, immigration, industrialization, and the emergence of the United States as a superpower. This introduction provides an overview of some of the most compelling episodes and abiding preoccupations in American thought, while showing how ideas have been major forces driving the course of American history.

The Significance of the Frontier in American Knowledge

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Cameron B. Strang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
History Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

This chapter introduces the history of knowledge in the Gulf South and why it matters to American intellectual history on the whole. It also presents the book’s main argument, which is that encounters in America’s borderlands shaped the production, circulation, and application of natural knowledge within these contested regions and, more broadly, throughout the empires and nations competing for them. The expansion of European powers and the United States were the primary motors that drove these encounters. Between the 1500s and the mid-1800s, Spanish, British, French, and U.S. imperialism brought hitherto unconnected individuals, nations, and environments into intellectually productive (though often physically destructive) contact. These expansion-instigated encounters, moreover, resulted in new material, social, and political circumstances that influenced how people created and shared natural knowledge.

New Directions in American Intellectual History

1980 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 449
Author(s):  
Gene Wise ◽  
John Higham ◽  
Paul K. Conkin
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
New Directions ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

WHAT IS OUR “CANON”? HOW AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORIANS DEBATE THE CORE OF THEIR FIELD

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID A. HOLLINGER
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Important Indicator ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Specific Research ◽  
The Core ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

These selected excerpts from a conversation now running nearly a quarter-century about The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook exemplify the efforts made by specialists in American intellectual history to decide just what constitutes the core of their field. An anthology designed for undergraduates has practical limitations, to be sure, that prevent its table of contents from ever serving as a complete map of a field. Specific research questions, not arguments over canons, properly remain the deepest center of gravity of any cohort of scholars. But assignments to students are one important indicator of what scholar–teachers take to be important, and these assignments are not unrelated to choices these same individuals make about the topics of their monographic contributions. Hence the lively correspondence that my coeditor, Charles Capper, and I have carried on with dozens of colleagues concerning the six editions of the only collection of sources for this field currently in print offers a window on how American intellectual history has changed in the last generation and what are its current directions.

Groove Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Social Perspectives ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Intellectual History

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Willie Jones

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-234
Author(s):  
Kyle Scott
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The North ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

This chapter examines the political thought of Anti-Federalist leader Willie Jones and attempts to situate him in the broader context of American intellectual history. A Virginia native from a prominent family, Jones established a plantation in Halifax County, which he represented in a series of colonial and state assemblies. After the colonies declared independence, Jones took charge of the radical faction in the North Carolina legislature. At the Hillsborough convention of 1788, Jones saw no need for North Carolina to ratify the Constitution immediately. He believed emotional and cultural ties united the thirteen states whatever their political status. North Carolina could join the Union whenever it wished. In the meantime, it could demand amendments to protect individual and states’ rights. Jones’s position reflected the long standing and widespread belief that small republics best protected individual liberty.

scholarly journals An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-484
Author(s):  
Carol Atack
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conjectural History

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

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